


Out of Service

by SLWalker



Series: The due South Zombie Radioplay [3]
Category: Midnight Blue - Fandom, due South
Genre: AU of Midnight Blue/Arch to the Sky, Body Horror, Gen, Illustrated, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Non-Linear Narrative, Racism, suicide ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-24
Updated: 2016-12-31
Packaged: 2017-12-27 12:30:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 16
Words: 9,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/978901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SLWalker/pseuds/SLWalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What was there left to do, but keep going?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Oath

 

* * *

 

The gray and navy and yellow was stained and damaged, but he didn't want to part with his uniform. Even though it was already ruined. Even though there was no opportunity to wash it. Even though.

Even though.

_I, Michael Chase, solemnly swear that I will faithfully, diligently and impartially execute and perform the duties required of me as a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police--_

His head buzzed at him, angry and tired, in the bright light of a spring morning. All around him, the dazed faces of his survivors -- a fraction. A _fraction_ of Nipawin's population -- started stumbling through whatever passed for a routine, exhausted and traumatized. They collapsed, almost as a group, when the daylight ended; hiding in their vehicles, waiting for dawn. Too tired to be awake, too frightened to truly rest; slept in fits and starts and somehow he always managed to hang on long enough to guard them. Even though he couldn't seem to keep his eyes focused. Even though his mind kept sliding _sideways._ Even though.

Even though.

_\--and will well and truly obey and perform all lawful orders and instructions that I receive as such--_

They'd come across a few more survivors, here or there. More dazed, panicked, broken people to watch out for. But no more Mounties. He had worked fine in a world without backup before, where help could be an hour or more away. But never quite forever away, before. Still he kept his radio on scan, just in case. Even though he might have been the only one left. Even though Mitch, Sandy and Russ were dead, and Turnbull likely with them.

Even though.

_\--without fear, favour or affection of or toward any person. So help me God._

So, he kept going. Kept guarding.

Even though.


	2. Galaxy

Time didn't want to move right.  
  
Mike probably would have worried about that, if not for the whole dying-in-the-grass thing he was doing. He didn't like it when his world became disordered unless he went and disordered it himself, and that was usually temporary and involved a holiday and alcohol.  
  
The sun was blazing, too hot, and his neck hurt, but Mike was too tired to even care so much and 414 was a boxy shadow next to him in the dark twilight while he shivered and curled around himself with the grass rustling under his head, feeling like he'd sucked on a handful of pennies, which tasted and looked oddly green, which made him wonder abstractly if that was what a trout saw as it swam upriver and eyed his fly on the surface of the pool and then the world was dirty blue and white again and his fingertips drew lines against the bottom of 414's door, some touchtone to reality and himself.  
  
Hot or cold as he got, most of what he was aware of was how tired he was. He didn't hallucinate, didn't feel wild terror at the realization of his own death, didn't try to bargain some higher power he didn't believe in for reprieve. Mike's only concession to anything was his cruiser and the hand he occasionally pressed to her door, cool and solid under skin that didn't know if it was burning or freezing, but certainly was dying.  
  
At one point in all of that, he rolled onto his back, looking up at the night sky and the whole arm of a galaxy, and it was so beautiful it hurt.  
  
"Oh, Cin, _look,_ " he whispered to his wife, and it didn't matter that she was a province and stilled heartbeat away.

 


	3. Fragments

Nothing quite worked right, after.  
  
Mike wasn't sure how long he slept. Days, weeks. Occasionally he came back enough to sip some water and once or twice he turned 414's key to run the heater briefly when it was colder, but mostly he slept and slept because he was dead and there was nothing else for him to do. Stayed buried in oblivion, broken only by fragments of dreams. He didn't believe in God, regardless of oath; didn't believe in Heaven, either. Turned out that dead was Manitoba. Born there, and apparently died there, too.  
  
He felt cast adrift, disjointed. The hearing he thought he'd lost permanently when he turned his .38 back next to his ear to shoot the runner off was crystal clear. The night wasn't black, as it should have been. The world was full; scents and crisp edges and he couldn't get over the stars, the number of, those moments he woke up in the too-bright night to see them.  
  
One night, he wasn't sure which or how many later, he looked into his rearview and the man looking back had a beard and his eyes glinted something between silver and blue in the moonlight.  
  
 _Oh._  
  
He met the realization at sea, too far from shore to find a light to guide him. He supposed he should have been afraid, but he just felt lost and half-numb.  
  
The next morning, he sat with his hands on the steering wheel, the solidity of his cruiser the only thing like reality in all of this, and then he turned the key and listened to the rumble of her engine, closing his eyes and holding onto that reality with all he had left in him, before he put her in drive and went to go find his survivors.


	4. Trigger

It was strange, staring down the barrel of your own sidearm.  
  
Mike wondered absently why he wasn't afraid. Or at least nervous. The .38 was loaded and while Bill Wilson didn't have the hammer back and the trigger pull on the double-action was a little fierce for a novice, the man could probably still manage to put at least one round in him. It was a reliable gun; Mike hadn't switched over to the semi-auto in part for that reason. It could take a beating and keep working, even if its round capacity was less. He wondered where the man had put his speedloaders, but didn't care enough to ask. He had given them everything except his cruiser and some water and himself when he left to go die, and now they were pointing his own gun at him.  
  
His survivors looked spooked. Mike couldn't actually blame them. He probably would be too, if he could bridge whatever disconnect there was between what he was thinking and what he wasn't feeling.  
  
"--how?" the man asked, the barrel of the gun trembling slightly.  
  
"I don't know how," Mike answered honestly, hands out to his sides. He _didn't_ know. He was dead and yet still walking, talking, thinking and breathing. He didn't know how. He could still feel the ache in the muscle where that runner's teeth sunk into his flesh, though it was almost entirely healed -- faster than it should have -- and he didn't know how he was standing here.  
  
He could guess what the man was thinking, though: _How many did we shoot that could have survived as almost human?_  
  
Mike didn't know that one, either.  
  
"What if you start biting?" Wilson asked, voice shaking.  
  
Mike quirked his eyebrows in a shrug. "Then go ahead and pull the trigger."


	5. Issue

They never did give him back his revolver.  
  
They didn't know what to do with him, either.  
  
They talked about it, when they thought they were far enough away from him. Turned out they weren't; Mike could pick out each voice with worrying clarity, as they grappled with the obvious ethical issues of shooting a sentient, self-aware zombie and the equally obvious safety issues of allowing even a sentient, self-aware zombie to stay with them. He probably didn't do much to help either side, having no input and not much to say to anyone. They had nothing to say to him, either, admittedly. His existence was a giant _issue_ in a world that had been brutally black and white.  
  
Some of what they said made him want to get angry, but he didn't have the will.  
  
For now, they didn't shoot him or kick him out, so Mike just followed along, keeping to himself. They offered him nothing of the supplies he'd helped gather, so he went out and foraged for his own; came back before dusk each evening because one set of reflective eyes in the night looked like another, even if part of him was tempted to just go, not come back.  
  
Even after everything that came later, he never knew if he should have or not.  
  
It was seven days later, towards evening, the day fine and almost enough to make him feel alive, when he heard the noise far off of engines running. Long before the others did. No small number of them, either.  
  
He stood up from his driver's seat, the door having been open so he could feel the breeze; he cocked his head, ignoring the way everyone in his vicinity tensed up like he was about to go rabid.   
  
"Someone's coming."


	6. Home




	7. Brittle

In the stories, the good guys always found a way to win and the bad guys did bad things, but there was a floor under those bad things; a depth that they couldn't go past, a line they weren't allowed to cross.  
  
What was never in the stories was the way clothes and hair crackled either from frost or filth, maybe both, a brittle sound. Or how some things registered as immediate, present, but other things were far away, through some invisible tunnel.  
  
The crackling, close; the voices, far.  
  
  
  
  
  
He couldn't remember why he kept breathing.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
"It's just a fucking zombie, I don't know why you're so fucking worked up over it!"  
  
The voice was shrill with fear, despite the defiant words. Far.  
  
No one bothered arguing.  
  
  
  
  
  
In the stories, the good guys found a way to win. Big triumphs against impossible odds. Bad guys weren't allowed to go too far, either.  
  
  
  
  
  
There was a pop. In the haze of cold nothing, he recognized it as gunfire. Small caliber.  
  
Victory was fire.  
  
When did he make his last choice? When did he _really_ make it? Sometimes he thought he knew; knew when he had made the last one, but sometimes it just seemed like all choices narrowed down and down and down  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Dead things had nightmares. He didn't remember what cold was because it was everything.  
  
Victory was fire. A choice. Maybe that had been his last choice. Maybe the rest was  
  
  
  
  
  
  
and down. Maybe the rest was always inevitable.  
  
  
  
  
  
"Fucking Christ."  
  
Reeves.  
  
Dead things had nightmares and nightmares had names.  
  
The bitter prairie wind, close; the body he wore, far. He could hear it scrape and crackle dragged across the truck bed, but it was the wind that he could feel brush past his face, numbing but kind anyway.


	8. Nature

"What the fuck _are you_?"  
  
It had been four days, since the ambush.  
  
They hadn't figured it out, at first. Knew he was _the Mountie_ , but they didn't know he was undead, and Mike didn't volunteer it.  
  
The only good thing about being _the Mountie_ was sometimes drawing their attention off the civilians; not much, but some.  
  
A third of the people he'd managed to keep alive were dead now. He thought maybe they were the lucky ones. Of those left, the past four days had been a hell that made the zombies look like a bargain; forced labor, rape, sadism. The women suffered most, but none of them escaped unscathed.  
  
What happened when civilization broke down and there was nothing stopping the lowest common denominator from going even lower.  
  
But this was the first time Mike had seen fear in Reeves' eyes. The man hated him; Mike was proxy for every cop that had ever laid charges on the former tractor-trailer driver, the last known representation of the law, and Reeves made sure to take it back out of him in several ways over the past four days.  
  
This changed nothing. It also changed everything.  
  
When Mike started laughing, the bandits fell back nervously, clutching their weapons. Even Reeves took a step back, startled.  
  
Mike was still chuckling when he tipped his chin up. "You're such a _cliché_ , Reeves. What dimestore novel did they pull you out of?" He gestured sharply at his own eyes, knowing they were reflecting the low light, and grinned ferally. "Kind of makes you rethink the nature of our relationship, eh?"  
  
Reeves wasn't able to summon an answer; the hate in his eyes got hotter, the fear got colder.  
  
  
  
  
  
Turned out Mike could regrow most of his front teeth in about two weeks.


	9. 414




	10. Raven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The only bits that take place in the present are the second and third; the rest is all memory and delirium.

He felt carved, whittled, until what was left was sharp and the knife marks could be felt in the clean length of bone, too light and waiting for the wind to push him away. Sounded like an okay ending. Scattered in prairie or taiga or buried in river mud.  
  
  
  
_You're delirious, Chase, pull it together._ Could have been Russ or Sandy or himself; didn't know, just that it tried appealing to something that still had skin-eyes-muscle-nerves and he wasn't able to move, let alone pull it together.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
"--know, Reeves. A human woulda died weeks ago, but he's pretty far gone."  
  
"Save him, Jake, or that's your fix gone, too."  
  
"I'll do--"  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
A bird circled over his head; he shivered with 414 in the tall grass beside him.  
  
  
  
_"Hey, what does your name mean, anyway? Your first name."  
  
Turnbull stammered, gestured, said, "Ah-- it's-- while its most-- I mean, it means--" He paused, lips pressed into a thin line.  
  
"You don't have to tell me, I was just curious." Mike shrugged. "Mine supposedly means _ who is like God, _but wow, did my folks miss the mark there."_  
  
_"--from the raven's field," Turnbull answered, flushed._  
  
_Mike thought it over, then smiled. "Huh. I like that."_  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
"The nature of our relationship," Reeves said, in his ear, holding his head cranked back by a fist full of his hair, "is that you're my property. That better be the last time you forget it, Mountie."  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The bird circled and his eyes slid closed.  
  
"Tell him I said 'be safe,'" he said or whispered or maybe just thought.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
He didn't know he was still capable of raw, stark terror until he saw the knife come down, glinting in the light of the fire consuming 414.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
When he woke again, the bird had flown away.


	11. Pit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This isn't quite as dark as some chapters, but it still is pretty damn, sorry about that; it is wholly relevant to everything, though. It's also much longer because there was a lot to convey. Still non-linear, obviously.

He should have known this was coming.  
  
The moment they figured out he was infected, this became inevitable. The uglier parts of human nature guaranteed it, and besides that, everyone was a little more -- sometimes a lot more -- wary about putting hands on him, so they had to get their kicks somewhere.  
  
The moaning was eerie. Awful. Half-frantic desperation. It was a runner in an old service station pit, the kind people drove over to get their oil changed without having to get out of the car, and Mike still hadn't quite managed to reconcile the trappings of civilization with this wasteland, still sometimes waited for the world to right itself again, shake this off like a nightmare. He didn't know if they managed to drive the runner into the pit or if it had fallen in conveniently at some point prior to be discovered, but he did know he was going to end up in there with it.  
  
Mike wasn't sure what outcome to this he wanted, but given his lack of choices, it probably didn't matter anyway.  
  
The prairie sun was sweltering as Reeves dragged him into the garage with an entourage of heavily armed followers, wrenching the heck out of his shoulder, the metal of his own handcuffs biting into his wrists. Mike could smell old blood and oil and grease and whatever other bodily fluids, and he could smell the runner, too; could tell the difference between the runner's scent and that of the humans.  
  
It was a young male, still wearing most of his clothes, trying to figure out the way out of the pit, moaning and moaning, that terrible noise that had come to signal the coming of death.  
  
"Family reunion," Reeves said, giving him another jerk. Still pissed off, apparently. It had been three weeks since they'd figured out that Mike was dead, but Reeves was still holding a grudge, despite the fact he'd beaten Mike so hard that it took him a full day to come back to his senses. Though even then, Reeves hadn't managed to beat the grim satisfaction out of him.  
  
"I can see the resemblance. Takes after your mom, I bet," Mike said back, because really, what did he have to lose?  
  
"Cute." Reeves walked him right to the edge, until it was only going to take a push to knock him in, and Mike eyed the drop -- not that far -- to see how he was going to land to avoid breaking something. "See if your smart mouth does you any good down there," Reeves added, and then let go of his arm to shove him hard between the shoulders.  
  
  
  
  
  
As landings went, it wasn't the worst, but it was pretty bad anyway. Mike was starting to get how fast he could heal -- he was still getting used to the fit of _new teeth_ \-- and he was able to shake off things in days that would have taken him weeks to recover from before, but even as fast as that healing was, his head was still pretty bad and he still blacked out when he hit the ground for-- however long.  
  
He was becoming worryingly familiar with losing blocks of time. Sometimes he knew he wasn't actually unconscious, sometimes he knew he was, but mostly he just knew that time had jumpcut from one moment to some unrelated moment.  
  
It couldn't have been too long this time. The runner was still moaning. Mike was wondering, a little, why he wasn't being eaten alive. When he got his eyes open, the runner was still trying to get out of the pit and--  
  
\--wasn't paying him any attention at all.  
  
He could hear Reeves talking, and was a little disturbed how easily he could pick out that particular voice in the crowd, but Mike didn't have the energy or the wherewithal to focus on the words and after a few moments, he just closed his eyes again and  
  
  
  
  
  
It was quiet. Something was touching him.  
  
He slammed back into awareness scrambling backwards, not sure of _whowhatwherewhen,_ eyes wide but unseeing until his vision went from disorienting blur to crystal sharp again. His head hurt and so did his shoulder, his stomach roiling around nothing.  
  
It was quiet. The runner looked startled, dark eyes just as wide.  
  
He wasn't moaning.  
  
The pieces were starting to line up into place, and Mike huffed a few breaths around the ball of queasiness that could have been hunger or concussion or whatever else, half-sitting and half just crumbled on the ground, staring back at a being the likes of which had ended his life, had ended his town, his family, his friends and his world.  
  
The runner looked _worried_ , and after a moment edged forward again like Mike was some wounded animal, hands out, scooting in increments. Mike was so busy trying to slot this into his mental landscape that he didn't scramble back any further, though there wasn't much further he could even go.  
  
"--what?" he asked, voice cracked and much smaller than he liked, and somewhere between the urge to reassure a _zombie_ that he was fine and the urge to laugh in some genuinely unhinged manner because _really?_ , his eyes stung and and his vision blurred and he realized that those were tears.  
  
Even through the blur, the runner tilted his head curiously, finally close enough to touch, and even though Mike barely bothered acknowledging what had been his body these days, he could feel the light skim of fingers down an arm and then the more curious half-exploration to where his hands were cuffed behind his back, and then the runner was making _noise_ , a quiet 'hmm mm mm.'  
  
Mike was being reassured by a zombie.  
  
"I'm sorry," he said, and he didn't even know who he was saying it to. The runner. The world. He didn't know, he just knew he was. "I'm sorry," he said again, and then completely outwith any kind of control or reason or sense, he was sobbing hard enough that it jarred every injury, fresh or half-healed, and the runner was humming that noise that sounded worried and reassuring, sometimes sniffing and mostly petting and  
  
  
  
  
  
They caught the scent at the same time, but the reactions were completely different.  
  
The runner, who had been curled up against him in the deep shadows of the pit playing with the buttons of his shirt and sometimes still petting gently, snapped rigid and something thinking-feeling in his eyes went _away_ and Mike tried to tell him to stop, no, get down because they would shoot him, but the runner didn't hear him and shot to his feet moaning and turning in the direction of the scent and Mike knew what was coming next so he closed his eyes and ground his teeth together.  
  
The moan was cut off with a loud repercussion of gunfire echoing against concrete and the thump of a body hitting the ground and in the ringing silence after, Reeves said, "I'll be goddamned."  
  
Mike had only quit dry heaving by the time they came down and dragged him back out of the pit.  
  
Whatever Reeves must have seen on his face when he was back up top, Mike couldn't guess, but the usually wrenching grip on his arm was a lot lighter as he was walked back to the caravan and no one bothered him once he was chained back up, so he closed his eyes under the hot prairie sun and wondered which part of himself he left back there with the runner.


	12. Rust

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is hella dark in a very understated, read-between-the-lines way, but I promise, this is the actual darkest period of this story arc and while it doesn't get anything close to happy in this story, it doesn't get any _worse._ I totally won't blame you if you skip it, it took me a whole week to write it, and it's only three hundred words. Still non-linear.

"I had a squaw once," Reeves was saying, tone wistful, no malice. "Prettiest woman I ever went with. Hair down to her ass, black until the light turned it dark red, darker'n blood, darker'n rust."  
  
He hadn't starved himself. Apparently, his keepers forgot you had to feed the pet zombie. All Mike could summon while he got weaker, blinded and freezing and soulsick, was some screwed up hope that they'd keep forgetting until it was too late.  
  
They almost did, too.  
  
  
  
  
  
"I still remember what her skin felt like," Reeves was saying, and none of the times the man hurt him unsettled him like Reeves washing his head off, scrubbing away old blood and dirt, hands gentle. "The curve of her back, the valley."  
  
He kept slipping in and out, like he was on the high school stage moving between curtains, cutting through the auditorium to get to math class. Velvet, dark red. In and out, a brush, a whisper. His Mom's hair in the sun the same color; his own, too.  
  
He wished he could stop listening, but maybe this was what he had coming for wanting _out._ For being willing to abandon the survivors just to see an ending.  
  
  
  
  
  
"Make you a few shades darker, make you a woman, you'd be her spittin' image," Reeves was saying, and if Mike would have had the strength, he would have scoffed.  
  
Would ask Reeves if he regularly beat this woman he talked about, whether she had consent, whether he ever left her to starve and freeze, whether he ever took a knife to her face--  
  
He must've given some indicator he wasn't out, because Reeves' voice became less drifty and he said, "Go back to sleep," and since all of his choices ended with a kitchen match, Mike did.


	13. Stray

Before all of this, Bill Wilson had been a decent man. Kind of a busy body. Church going. Apt to call the detachment about the potential hoodlums walking down the road suspiciously, only for it to turn out to be your typical teenager. After the outbreak, he was the one who talked a lot about where they should go and what they should do. After Mike was turned, Bill was the one who pointed his gun at him, terrified of _what he was now._  
  
Now, Bill stood across from him under the bright sun, filthy and skinny and squinting against the light, and Mike looked back, and it seemed like a thousand lifetimes ago when they were Mister Wilson and Corporal Chase and Mike was rolling his eyes about the tenth call in a month about perfectly normal kids doing perfectly legal kid things.  
  
"It's simple." Reeves' winter-gray eyes slid between them with ease, and the coarse gravel of his voice reminded Mike of the rock salt thrown on the roads after a snow. "I don't _need_ this one," he said, nodding his head towards Bill while his gaze landed on Mike. "We're feeding and keeping him, and he's nothin', not even good for digging toilets."  
  
The last person that had been nothing was a survivor picked up after the ambush. When Mike escaped -- his sixth escape -- to get them out to run if they could, Reeves had taken that man and cut his throat like it was nothing as punishment for that escape, so fast that Mike hadn't even had a chance to protest.  
  
He would have begged. To save that life, he would have. Didn't matter that it wasn't one of Nipawin's survivors, Mike would have begged; dignity was worthless in comparison.  
  
Reeves never gave him the chance.  
  
Even as far away as everything felt right now in this moment, lost in numbed-over horror, Mike felt his hands shake where they were locked behind his back, looking at Bill there and knowing just how easy it would be for Reeves to kill the man.  
  
"Unlock him, Price," Reeves said.  
  
If the despair of what might happen next wasn't enough, it was the way Bill looked at _him_ that made it somehow worse.  
  
Reeves slapped Bill on the back, making the man flinch, then walked over and crowded into Mike's space, just offsides, just enough to turn his head and stir Mike's ratty, too-long hair with his breath. He didn't need to get that close to be heard, but that likely wasn't the point.  
  
"If you run, Mountie... if you don't come back with what I want by the time the sun goes down, I'm going to start cutting parts of him off. Maybe start with a finger, maybe a toe. Maybe get more creative. And I'm going to keep doing it until you come back or there's nothing left."  
  
Despite everything, the adrenaline made Mike tremble. He knotted his jaw, not looking over, and nodded once, a short and sharp motion.  
  
As bad as Reeves was, he never insisted on petty stuff. He didn't care if Mike insulted him; he held all of the cards. Didn't care if Mike spoke aloud or not, as long as he obeyed, and staring at the half-broken man standing stinking and terrified under the sun, they both knew he would.  
  
  
  
  
  
The flock of birds broke from the overgrown grass well ahead of him, a sharp burst of wings and feathers rustling, making to wheel away.  
  
This was the first time since capture that Mike had been alone.  
  
It didn't entirely feel _real_ \-- as much as anything felt real these days, anyway -- and he had a hard time slotting it into his mind. He kept expecting to wake up chained to something, having been beaten senseless. Or checking back in from whatever nowhere his mind went when he checked out. Or, if he was being generous with himself, wake up laying next to his cruiser in Manitoba. The act of walking with a pack over his shoulder, the high grass brushing his knees and thighs, was so familiar as to be foreign.  
  
The caravan was pretty solid, in terms of defense. They had little trouble plowing through small groups of infected, and they were smart enough to avoid areas where their cars might be blocked in or where there might be larger groups. Cities were written off as too dangerous for the population. Mike might have been treated worse than Reeves' dogs, but he could probably hear as well as them now, and he'd heard them debating on going after harder-to-find stuff in cities and deciding it wasn't safe.  
  
Until now. Until they had a dead man on a leash who wouldn't be bothered by the other walking dead out there and could go for them.  
  
Yorkton was a test run; Reeves seeing just how tight that leash was. Despite glazed over horror, Mike could feel it twist in his heart; Yorkton and Nipawin were both in the same zone, both answered to the same dispatchers, and even though he didn't know any of the Mounties down here personally, he knew their voices. Knew their unit numbers, knew which ones ate a mic and which ones liked to run traffic or stir up trouble, and they knew his voice, too.  
  
\--had known.  
  
Had known.  
  
He could probably grab weapons and ammo; he was bound to run across dead Mounties here, who'd have keys to their free-standing detachment building. Yorkton's was large, too; city and rural detachments both. He remembered it was somewhere around the Canadian Tire; had only been through here once or twice, picking up a piece of transferred equipment for Nipawin, but he could find it. Then Mike could walk back to that caravan and go down in a hail of gunfire. Or heck, grab a cruiser and drive back, plow his way into the heart of that group and maybe put one between Reeves' eyes. He was a good shot. He could knock off a chunk of them before they got him.  
  
Even at his best, though, even before he was dead and damaged, Mike knew he didn't stand a chance against upwards of seventy or eighty armed people holding over a dozen hostages against him.  
  
That didn't stop the churn of desperate thought anyway.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Reeves had two dogs; mean tempered things, bulky and snappish. Picked them up after the outbreak. They menaced everyone, but they stayed away from Mike; anytime they strayed anywhere near enough to him to note, they immediately turned the other way.  
  
Mike didn't put it together, though, until Yorkton. Why the birds scattered even when he wasn't walking that close to them. Why the mice -- which he could hear in the grass -- took off in all directions. Somewhere the part of him that was still a police officer, still knew how to pick out patterns and see anomalies, noted it.  
  
But it wasn't until Yorkton that he figured it out. Well, about two miles outside of Yorkton, anyway.  
  
There was another stray, trotting across the yard of an old house. It pulled up when it saw Mike and startled, tail tucking, but when he didn't rush it, it started slowly wagging its tail and Mike gave a whistle, just to see if the dog would come over.  
  
It did-- until it didn't. Ran towards him with a doggie smile and then when it got to a certain point, it stopped in its tracks and then turned around and ran away, bolting with tail tucked again.  
  
When it came into scent range.  
  
  
  
  
  
Yorkton wasn't overrun, but it wasn't anything close to empty, either. There were some particularly hearty zombies still shuffling along the streets, though there were fewer of those than there were former zombies rotting or dessicating. There were also runners, and just like the one in the pit, they didn't moan or rush Mike, though several of them watched him curiously and a few even approached.  
  
Something in his posture must have given them pause, though; they made friendly overtures, but when he couldn't summon up any kind of answer for them, they didn't crowd close.  
  
Half a dozen stupid ideas crossed his mind; the kinds of things he'd come up with as plots for childhood adventures, playing with the other kids who occupied the village he'd grown up in. The kinds of plots where the good guys beat all of the odds. He could pied piper some fellow dead people back to the caravan. Could find some pocket of human resistance that didn't know what he was and therefore might help him. Could grab enough firepower to take out Reeves, at least, and his inner circle; maybe the rest of the structure would fall apart enough to have minimal casualties.  
  
Two of those were even kind of viable, as plans went; either, maybe both.  
  
He stared back at one of the runners who had been following him down these abandoned, sometimes blocked streets, and then the runner slowly crept closer until he was practically burying his nose in Mike's shirt, and when he got done giving Mike a good sniffing, he stood back up and huffed a friendly noise and then went back to his own business.  
  
Mike had shot the likes of him before.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
When he checked back in, not sure when or why he checked out, he was sitting in the middle of the road five blocks straight down from where he had been with his head in his hands.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The hospital signs were good. He didn't have time to look for a map.  
  
For as many grand notions he had of going out in some blaze of glory and mowing down as many bad guys as he could with live ammunition or fellow dead people, there were just as many flashes of the dead faces of his survivors. Or the dead face of the runner who had been trying to help him in that pit. Or the one who just thought he was something interesting to sniff. He believed in self-defense, but--  
  
He thought about the the way the man who had been nothing choked and jerked with blood pouring down from the ugly slice through his neck after Reeves cut his throat, and even after every horror he'd seen, it was so stunning that Mike waited for the movie to stop and was honestly half-surprised when it didn't, and when that man landed at his feet.  
  
Most of the things on the list were, predictably, controlled substances of some kind or another. Legal or not. There were some surprisingly practical things -- one of the men there, some guy named Jake, had been a paramedic before he'd gotten addicted to narcotics and ruined his own career (amazing what gossip you heard when you could hear like a dog) -- and he no doubt influenced the list. Most of the stuff Mike needed to grab could be grabbed from the hospital, provided it fell fast enough to avoid human looting.  
  
The dead didn't need painkillers.  
  
When he got there, it looked exactly how he'd expected it to. Bodies. Destruction. Crashed cars. Old blood staining the walls and concrete. It was bigger than Nipawin's hospital. There was a pharmacy across the street.  
  
There was a burned out RCMP cruiser in the parking lot, and the charred body next to it had a canary yellow stripe down his trouser leg, smudged and stained and filthy, but wholly recognizable. Mike must have lost ten minutes or more just standing there staring at the brightest part of yellow left, no words left to go with his thoughts.  
  
After that, he just went and did what he'd been told. Picked his way through the hospital, able to see where no human would, to be able to get things. Lost himself into the logistics of it, and found something that felt almost like relief there; in doing something, even for the bad guys, that was at least proactive and not reactive. He didn't pretend he was doing anything good. But at least he didn't feel like he was doing everything wrong.  
  
He still stopped again on the way back out, looking at the dead Mountie and wondering which voice he'd once been.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
In any other lifetime, any at all, the sight of 414 would have made his world just right enough. Even after the outbreak. Even after he was bitten. No matter how dark everything got, no matter how tired he was. She couldn't give him back his wife, his friends, his house, his town or his world; she couldn't give him back his life.  
  
But she was the only home he had left.  
  
They usually had the cruiser at the front of the caravan because it drew out unsuspecting survivors; desperate people who had been under siege either literally or mentally and wanted to believe that the Mounties might have come to rescue them. Mike wondered, kind of abstractly, what it said about him that he felt more violated by that than he did actual bodily violation -- or was it technically necrophilia? -- and decided he didn't care.  
  
He wondered more if the man Reeves had so easily cut the throat of had looked at that cruiser and came out of hiding. If he might not have, if she hadn't been there like a promise.  
  
She stood in the gold of the evening sun, dirty but intact but violated, and even if it probably didn't say anything good about him, it pissed Mike off so bad that it burned. He must have still had some of that written on his face when he shoved the pack at Reeves, grinding teeth new and old together.  
  
Reeves tilted his head, taking the pack and looking in it, before handing it off to the addict paramedic who seemed to be something between deeply relieved and a little terrified. Then he looked back at Mike, eying him in mixed affection and malice, amused. "Light a fire under you, did it, Mountie?"  
  
_You have no idea._  
  
  
  
  
  
  
He was sent back to Yorkton so many times, getting supplies and fuel and drugs and everything else, that Mike got incredibly proficient at it. He wasn't sure how he felt about the expeditions, the strange not-freedom of it, but at least no one who could use it against him saw him take time here or there just to sit with his face in his hands. No one cared if he fed himself, and he did; they sure weren't consistent about it at the caravan. He made sure to try to cover his tracks going back and forth, not for the bandits, but for the runners in the town who might follow his scent and be shot for it.

He got everything he could on those lists, and sometimes had to get creative about hand trucks to get it all back.  
  
He also started collecting his own gas cans.  
  
The last time he went to town, he didn't grab guns and ammunition and a cruiser. Didn't pied piper his fellow dead. Didn't put into motion any grand, high-casualty plans the likes of which made for good plots for rural kids in northwest Manitoba.  
  
He brought back a box of kitchen matches, instead.


	14. Silhouette

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mike goes salvaging in Saskatoon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still non-linear. This is the third to last piece of Out of Service. <3

The snow fell and fell and fell.  
  
Even in a halfway decent coat -- concession to the fact he had no body fat left as insulation -- it was too cold. The snow was fine; light flakes that came at the bottom end of the temperature range snow could even fall, and it came down so relentlessly that it made all but the most immediate area invisible, whited out.  
  
This was the first time he'd been out since he'd nearly starved. Saskatoon. There was a fuel tanker out there that had not flipped or burned, just been abandoned well outside the city, and that had given the bandits plenty of incentive to stay in the area for awhile. Which, of course, meant that they needed someone to bring back their various vices. They were good at stockpiling food and water from more rural areas and some of the really small towns, but so-called luxury items were a whole lot harder to get in any decent quantity outside of cities, so eventually Mike had to go.  
  
Even more than being cold, though, he was tired.  
  
"What if the weather turns?" he'd asked Reeves, voice rough and almost painful to use. The clouds were heavy and hanging low, and it looked entirely possible that it was going to get ugly before he'd have a chance to really even get into the city, let alone back with everything on the list.  
  
Reeves had his own issues to contend with; when you had addicts you wanted to keep loyal, you had to make sure you gave them what they wanted. Everything was rationed, but it had been a long time since those were renewed. He cast eyes up himself, then shook his head. "Hunker down, come back when it stops, or come morning if it lets up after dark."  
  
As if this were some mutual venture. As if they were somehow working together for the greater good.  
  
Mike didn't even have it in him to snort in grim amusement for that. "My survivors?"  
  
"I'm not gonna kill 'em over a snowstorm," Reeves answered, like the thought would never occur, handing the pack over. Mike didn't quite know what to feel about finding a couple of bottles of clean water in there when the weight surprised him. "Dawdle until afternoon tomorrow, I might rethink things."  
  
Sure enough, the snow came and the world went white, and Mike still managed to drag himself to the Royal University Hospital, which was a huge and imposing building. Like every other hospital he'd laid eyes on, it was the site of tragedy and carnage, of bodies and more bodies, of burned cars and old blood stains. It didn't offer much shelter from the cold, though, and even well below freezing, he could pick out the after-scents of decay and death, distilled misery.  
  
It was only after he was leaving, the world already getting darker -- it took awhile to scavenge in new places, learning the lay of the land -- that Mike realized he hadn't seen any other walking dead.  
  
The runners were hiding or gone.  
  
  
  
  
  
His no-longer-new status of 'dead' had afforded him a lot more cold tolerance than he'd had before. Mike went and rummaged through a thrift store in the twilight, found some gloves to pull on, but even despite the exposure, his fingers weren't frostbitten. They would have been, should have been, were he alive and human. But despite being cold and painful, they weren't actually frostbitten.  
  
He found gloves and a hat, found new socks to layer over his, then ventured back out into the still-falling snow to find a grocery store or something. They'd definitely made sure he wasn't going to waste away now that they knew it was possible, but he was still a mess and even if he'd half forgotten what hunger felt like, he knew logically he needed energy.  
  
It was mostly dark -- at least, it would have been dark without the night vision -- when he found a grocery store that didn't look unrecognizable for being ransacked. One pane of windows was broken, but it might still have something of worth. Perishables were out pretty fast after the end, Mike knew because he had been the primary scavenger for his survivors before capture, but that still left a lot of stuff that was okay. In Yorkton, the runners had wiped out the easy stuff -- potato chips, candy, anything in a wrapper that was easy -- but they didn't know how to open cans.  
  
The floors were covered in debris. Sometimes he turned a corner and found a body. Sometimes the body clicked teeth at him laboriously, before realizing he wasn't human and quit. Mostly, he ignored those and just focused on getting to the canned goods. It was getting colder; the snow might taper, but the temperature itself was going to be--  
  
  
There was a tall shape.  
  
Mike scrambled backwards until his back hit shelves, knocking some cans down to bounce off the floor in a racket, and the tall shape jumped backwards a half-second slower before crouching and making an almost canine noise at him, a low _whuff_ sound like a dog's warning bark.  
  
From halfway across the small grocery store, they stared at one another. Both of them breathing hard.  
  
After a few moments of heart pounding silence, the shape stood slowly and the blanket it was wearing like a hood fell back, and the runner stared back at him and Mike blinked once or twice at a _zombie_ doing a pretty fair impression of a jedi and didn't know if that sound he wanted to make was a laugh or a sob, so he didn't make it.  
  
Apparently, some of them had stayed or survived.  
  
After another moment of watching, the runner turned back to the bag of--  
  
Well. Dog food was edible. Mike wasn't going to judge. Rover was probably long gone anyway.  
  
  
  
  
  
It probably would have ended there, if the runner hadn't gotten curious about what Mike was doing. He supposed he did look kind of silly paying attention to metal rocks when there were bags that still contained food, but while Mike didn't have anything like pride left, he'd prefer beef stew over dog food and most of the cans on these shelves were actually still viable, though warming them up was going to take some thought.  
  
But after warily guarding his dog food for awhile, the runner came to watch him, blanket back over his head. On closer inspection, he had more than a couple on, too; layers of blankets around him, and towels rudimentarily tied around his feet, too.  
  
"You might be better dressed than I am," Mike said, having gone and grabbed a basket to carry dinner in, mentally noting the absurdity of using a grocery basket in a grocery store. Still hurt to talk; felt like he hadn't in years instead of months.  
  
The runner startled a little and looked around as if to ask, _are you talking to me?_ and then stared back at Mike with wide eyes.  
  
It would have been cute; Mike couldn't summon up much thought or feeling for it, but it still made him huff to himself as he headed for another aisle to grab a can opener and maybe a barbecue lighter with lighter fluid. And the runner followed along, carrying the dog food bag, occasionally spilling kibbles on the floor.  
  
He figured they'd be parting ways when they got back outside the glass, but when he went to go and head off to find somewhere to maybe build a fire and thaw out dinner, the runner plucked at his sleeve after taking a long sniff at him -- something Mike was almost used to, now -- and gave a light tug in the opposite direction.  
  
Even tired, even in the dark, Mike could recognize an invitation. After a long moment's deliberation, he quirked broken eyebrows to himself and followed along.  
  
  
  
  
Turned out it wasn't a long walk at all. It also turned out that the jedi-runner wasn't the only survivor of winter.  
  
There were ten of them. Two females, eight males. Mike couldn't discern what about them meant they survived or stayed in Saskatoon, despite how cold and harsh it was, but it was clear they were some kind of-- unit, or pack, or family. They looked surprised when he followed the jedi-runner into the house through a damaged front door, but not angry. The males shifted to sort of put themselves between him and the females, but after a moment where he set down his grocery basket and held his hands up peaceably, the older of the females made a noise and the males moved.  
  
Huh.  
  
Then he had to endure the group coming up to sniff on him. The females lingered on it, searching over his face with an unnerving amount of fascination and something he hesitated to call sympathy, but they respected it when he pulled back from any questing fingers and gently pushed their hands away.  
  
The house they'd made a-- home? nest? in wasn't very large. There were a ton of blankets and pillows on the floor and furniture of what had once been someone's living room; more blankets and pillows than could have come from this house. The furniture itself had been moved to make it even more nest-like, circling the corner of the room. There was a fireplace and even a stack of wood in a wrought iron stand, but they didn't know how to light a fire.  
  
"I should go get more," Mike said to himself, but it made all of the runners look at him wide-eyed, with the exception of the jedi, who had already heard him talk. One of the males, older and incredibly hairy, goggled at him like he'd just explained the meaning of the universe.  
  
He didn't expect an answer other than that, and they didn't give one. Unnecessarily, Mike just said, "I'll be back in a bit," then left his stuff and turned to leave.  
  
  
  
  
  
The temperature kept sliding down and down. Above, the clouds started breaking up in the crystal cold air.  
  
Mike couldn't remember the last time he felt any wonder looking up at the incredible array of stars he could see. He couldn't summon any wonder now, anyway, but he still stood there for long minutes looking up and remembering the first time he'd noticed just how vivid, how beautiful, they were. Just a flash amidst burning up, sick and dying, of something so incredibly miraculous that he wanted nothing more than to tell his wife about it.  
  
He had no idea where his wedding band ended up. He knew he hadn't taken it off himself, but he couldn't remember what had, either.  
  
He wasn't sure why he'd gone back and gotten a proper grocery cart and more cans of food; why he went and gathered wood from the shed behind the house, still intact and dry. He dragged all of his haul into the house; coming in the second time didn't startle anyone, though they watched him curiously. Strangest commune Mike ever encountered. Dead people cuddling in blankets and keeping each other warm, the silvery hints of eyeshine greeting him from the faint moon and starlight that made it through a grimy window. Not human; people, nonetheless.  
  
He was shivering pretty hard when he built the fire. He hadn't noticed it before then, really. Paper was in short supply, but he took a bit from the dog food bag now piled with other easy-to-eat things this little group had thought to bring back to save for later, and he peeled some splinters off of the split wood with dumb, shaking fingers for kindling. It took about ten tries to get it lit, and another three to get it to stay lit, but then there was a little fire slowly growing and consuming.  
  
The runners watched all of this with rapt fascination. When he held his hands out to warm them off of the fire, a few crept over to stare at the flames, then his fingers, then the flames again. One tried it, then another, and then they were making little noises at one another that sounded excited.  
  
Mike thought that if the fire was this much of a hit, the stew was going to be like Zombie Christmas.  
  
  
  
  
  
They had the table manners of toddlers, but it was the first time Mike managed to smile in-- months? However long he didn't know, but it made the corners of his mouth creep up, watching the way they devoured the stew he heated over the fire. He'd had to fend them off until it was cool enough to just pass the pot to them, which had lead to some confusion, but once they had it -- and there was a _lot_ of stew in it and more on the fire warming up -- they looked at him with huge, shocked eyes and openly surprised expressions, and then ate.  
  
Well, the females ate first. The males didn't even try to get any before the two females were having their fill, carefully upending the pot and slurping or pausing to chew through chunks of meat, and then it was passed to the males starting with the younger ones and then moving to the other ones. No one got left out, though some got more than others.  
  
It was repeated when the second pot, absent a bowl for Mike, was handed over, but this time it seemed almost more ritualistic. The females took token sips, then passed the pot off, and it went down the same sort of order, with one or two places flipped presumably because they didn't mean anything.  
  
If Mike were more of a scientist, less broken, less exhausted, he might have tried to work out more about them. How they decided who ate when. The females were clearly in charge. He might have sat down and contemplated what the virus did, how it had made these beings who would kill or infect a living human, but who amongst themselves were largely peaceful and kind to one another.  
  
He did watch them, though, and even for as numb and tired as he was, he didn't fear them. Didn't think if he slept here, by the fire, any of them would hurt him. He finished his own dinner -- with a spoon and a bowl -- and borrowed a couple of the blankets from the nest. He stoked up the fire, threw enough logs on to last awhile, and curled up at the end of what had once been someone's game-time television spot, a lifetime or a thousand ago.  
  
He thought about a lot of things, between now and nightmares, in that twilight place where the shadows softened and where everything was cast in silhouette. Thought about his life and his death and his choices and his final lack of; thought about humanity and what made a person alive to begin with. And he thought of home, too.  
  
He watched the fire he'd set, and came to a quiet realization that this was it.  
  
This was what he had left. A future of a hundred cities, a hundred vices provided for, and returning himself to the hands of someone who would bring the knife down on his face between them. Until his survivors died off or until he did. There was no rescue coming, and he didn't have enough left in him to rescue anyone else, including himself.  
  
He watched the fire, and then closed his eyes and listened to the breathing of ten other bodies, no longer human yet kind, who'd be a little warmer tonight for his efforts, even small.  
  
Unlike the last fire he lit, at least this one didn't turn some part of him to ash.


	15. Still

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for gore and body horror.


	16. Circle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One year after the outbreak, on the way into Calgary...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's it (for now) for Mike's tale in the Radioplay universe. You can decide what kind of note it was left on. Hope to see you at [the due South Zombie Radioplay on Tumblr](http://dszrp.tumblr.com) for the re-release of the original staring on January 6th.


End file.
